God did NOT save Trump, says RNS

Republican New Yorker Ex-Pres. DJ Trump admires his future and guns (nytimes.com)

I am God. I inspired Crooks to shoot, I redirected the bullet, and I saved Trump. I am that I am.

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Nothing happens unless I will it

(RNS) — I’m glad Donald Trump is alive, and I’m quite confident God is, too.

But my understanding of Christian theology makes me certain that God did NOT save the former president from assassination.

Nearly immediately after word of the shooting broke, pastors and politicians took to social media to thank God for saving Trump.

“God protected President Trump,” Florida VP hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio posted on Twitter (X). Franklin Graham chimed in.

I'm God's candidate. See my lead earring?

Robert Jeffress, senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas, said it was “a demonstration of the power of Almighty God,” calling it “inexplicable apart from God.”

Was it all staged with fake blood?

Jeffress, a longtime Trump supporter, went further: “I believe God spared Donald Trump’s life for a purpose…for the purpose of calling our nation back to its Judeo-Christian foundation.”

Theology — the attempt by finite human minds to try to make sense of a "God" who is infinitely bigger than human imagination — can be tricky.

• Faith leaders, politicians invoke God’s protection for Trump in wake of shooting
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• The military is the reason why the pacifist Amish have their famous long biblical beards

Crooks is a Republican Jew?

But in this case, it’s not that hard to see that there is something wrong with a theology that says God intervened to save Trump, which implies in an awful way that God [or the Gnostic's Demiurge] redirected the bullet into the person who was killed at his rally, or the two people who were grievously injured.

One of the few things we can say definitively about God is this: God is love. This idea is at the heart of the Christian faith.

The New Testament says, “No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another God abides in us….” The Apostle Paul wrote, “All the law is summed up into this command — Love. Love God and each other.”...

My bad. I made Crooks do it without practice

If our theology [and worship of an openly genocidal Old Testament God calling for us to murder, massacre, abduct, rape, enslave, and kill by stoning anyone said to be displeasing] does not make us more loving, then we should question our theology.

In the words of theologian Barbara Brown Taylor, “The only clear line I draw these days is this: When my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor…Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.” More: God did not save Donald Trump (RNS via MSN)

Shane Claiborne

[Shane Claiborne is an author, activist, and co-director of Red Letter Christians (redletterchristians.org). The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of the publishers at Religion News Service (RNS, religionnews.com).]